Companies like Lycos and Excite were also offering mail services. In October 1997, Yahoo bought a company called Four11, which offered a product called Rocketmail (later became Yahoo mail). The competition was already awake to the opportunity. By the end of 1997, Hotmail had over 9 million users.Īround this time, Microsoft was cobbling together an internet strategy which involved driving traffic to sites like msn.com and travel portal Expedia (which it spun off and exited later). And what better way to do this than buy into a free email service (popularly known as freemail) with its millions of users? Hotmail launched its freemail services on July 4, 1996. The idea was to drive traffic to websites, which would then translate to advertising and e-commerce revenues. Everybody was talking about “capturing eyeballs”. In the last days of 1997, the company signed a deal with Hotmail for an estimated $400 million. Hotmail was Microsoft’s largest acquisition for a long time. The point Chitnis is making is that Microsoft did not have a clear-cut internet strategy in the mid-90s.īut when the Redmond giant decided to play the internet game, it chose do so in a big way: a slew of acquisitions. “Earlier that year, Microsoft had released Windows 95 without internet support,” says Chitnis.
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